By Anthony Perlas · Nightlife Report · November 1, 2026 · Part Two of a series. Read Part One: The Game You Didn’t Agree to Play
In Los Angeles after midnight, the people who feed on talent rarely look like monsters. They look like hosts. They pick up the table, learn your name, and ask where you’re from. This is Part Two of our investigation into the control tactics around nightlife and modeling: how a person is cut off from family, trapped with the law, paid through apps, and spoken to in a language they were never taught. Every claim below is tied to a public source, and every line from our own reporting is marked as ours.
“Traffickers employ a variety of control tactics, the most common include physical and emotional abuse and threats, isolation from friends and family, and economic abuse.”
Vampires, werewolves and the people who stay human
We use these names as metaphor, not as a description of any group of people. A vampire, in this column, is the middleman who lives off someone else’s work. A werewolf is the one who looks like a friend in daylight and changes after the bottles arrive. Staying human means keeping your family, your friends, your judgment and your name.
Nobody in this story is named. No race, nationality or faith is blamed. Exploiters come from every background, and so do the people who stop them.
RelatedHercules vs the Vampires Review: LA Opera Just Beat the Movie Palace Final Boss
The psychology of control
The first wound is rarely physical. Polaris, which runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline, describes how victims stay stuck:
“Fear, isolation, guilt, shame, misplaced loyalty and expert manipulation are among the many factors that may keep a person from seeking help or identifying as a victim even if they are, in fact, being actively trafficked.”
The State Department’s annual report lists the tools in one sentence:
“The coercive scheme can include threats of force, debt manipulation, withholding of pay, confiscation of identity documents, psychological coercion, reputational harm, manipulation of the use of addictive substances, threats to other people, or other forms of coercion.”
— U.S. Department of State, 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report
Note “reputational harm.” In the rooms we cover, it often comes as a rumor. You get a label and the room goes quiet, and you learn that leaving will cost you your name.
Dividing the family
A controller can’t own someone who still has people. So the people go first. The family “doesn’t understand.” The old friends are “holding you back.” The new group chat is “your real family.” Part One documented the vocabulary of that counterfeit home: Daddy, wife-in-law, the stable.
The FBI tells the public to watch for this sign:
“Victims may avoid eye contact or seem disoriented, withdraw or isolate themselves from family and friends, or defer to other for answers to simple questions.”
FinCEN, the Treasury bureau that tracks dirty money, gives banks almost the same question to ask:
“Does the person appear disconnected from family, friends, community organizations, or houses of worship?”
The body as leverage: coerced abortion
The hardest numbers in this story come from a survey of sex-trafficking survivors in the Annals of Health Law by Laura J. Lederer and Christopher A. Wetzel:
“More than half (55.2%) of the sixty-seven respondents who answered reported at least one abortion, with twenty respondents (29.9%) reporting multiple abortions.”
The authors write that the survey did not always show “whether the abortion was coerced,” and they call the pattern of forced abortion “an especially disturbing trend.” The point is control, not health care. A controller decides what happens to someone else’s body, and that decision becomes one more debt and one more secret.
Blackmail with the law
Here is the trap the Admiral has described from years in these rooms. Someone hands you drugs, often cocaine, or leaves them in your bag, your car or your name. Then the threat comes: do what we say, or we call the police and you’re the one with a record. Our own reporting finds that the threat of arrest can hold a person as tightly as a lock.
Federal reporting backs up the pattern. The State Department lists “manipulation of the use of addictive substances” as a coercion tool, and it warns about “forced criminality,” in which victims are made to commit crimes. That way the victim fears the police more than the trafficker does.
If this is happening to you, the law is on your side more often than the threat claims. Talk to a lawyer before you talk to anyone else about what you were made to carry. Legal aid organizations and the hotline below can connect you with one. We are not publishing any attorney’s number we have not verified.
The VIP room and the bathroom
In our reporting, the deal is almost never made on the dance floor. It happens behind the rope, in the VIP room, where the host decides who comes in, or in the bathroom, where there are no cameras and the line keeps moving. These are the Admiral’s own observations from the scene, not a government finding. The rule that follows from them is simple. If a stranger wants to talk business where nobody can see, the business isn’t for you.
Follow the money: crypto, apps and stock
Cash is no longer the only currency in the room. FinCEN told banks in 2020:
“In addition to payment via cash, traffickers also have accepted payment via credit cards, prepaid cards, mobile payment applications, and convertible virtual currency.”
“For example, human traffickers have purchased prepaid cards, and then used the cards to purchase virtual currency on a peer-to-peer exchange platform.”
FinCEN uses the category “mobile payment applications.” It doesn’t name brands. Our own reporting is that the apps people mention in these rooms are Cash App and Apple Pay, that Snapchat is used for the conversation because messages disappear, and that some payments now move as shares of company stock. The stock claim comes from our sources and the Admiral’s reporting. We could not find a federal advisory that confirms it, so treat it as a lead, not a fact. The app companies did nothing wrong by existing. The red flag is a stranger who wants to pay you, or be paid by you, in a way nobody can trace.
Polaris says its Financial Intelligence Unit “has been able to identify coded language related to domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) online on social media platforms” (Polaris Financial Intelligence).
The slang: Vampire, Lion, King
Part One listed the terms that anti-trafficking groups and prosecutors have documented: the game, the life, Daddy, bottom, quota, choosing up, renegade, seasoning. In Part Two we add the words the Admiral hears on the scene: “Vampire,” “Lion,” “King Lion” and “King.” In his reporting, “King” and “King Lion” are titles men give themselves to claim rank over a room or a group of women, and “Vampire” is what insiders call the one who feeds on others. We could not find these meanings in any published government or NGO glossary. They are Anthony Perlas’s reporting from the scene, not established definitions, and the same words mean innocent things in most conversations.
The principle is sourced, though. Polaris documents coded language online, and the old glossaries exist because the trade runs on words outsiders can’t read. If you don’t understand the language, you may be pulled into a game you didn’t agree to. When a phrase doesn’t make sense, ask what it means out loud, or leave.
“Where are you from? What city?”
In Los Angeles that question isn’t always small talk. The sociologist Robert Garot studied it in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography:
“This article investigates how young people in an inner-city ecology invoke the relevance of gangs by demanding, ‘Where you from!’”
On the street, it can be a challenge about territory. In our reporting, the nightlife version is quieter. It asks whose area you’re working in and who you answer to, and the Admiral reports that an overseer is often watching. You don’t owe a stranger your city, your neighborhood or your crew. “I’m just here with friends” is a full answer.
What the agencies know, on the record
- FBI: defines human trafficking as “the use of force, threats of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit individuals for labor or services” and publishes the indicators quoted above. Tips: tips.fbi.gov or 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324).
- DHS Blue Campaign and HSI: the Department of Homeland Security’s public awareness campaign. HSI’s tip line, 1-866-347-2423, is answered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Its specialists take reports on “more than 400 laws enforced by ICE HSI, including those related to human trafficking” (DHS).
- FinCEN (Treasury): Advisory FIN-2020-A008 tells banks which money patterns to flag, including funnel accounts, prepaid cards, mobile payment apps and virtual currency.
- State Department: the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which also grades the United States.
- Polaris Project: runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline and publishes its case data.
- The CIA: we found no public CIA material on trafficking in American nightlife. The CIA is a foreign intelligence agency. Inside the country, the FBI and HSI lead the investigations. Anyone who claims to know what “the CIA knows” about your club is selling something.
How to stay human
Report it
- Immediate danger: call 911.
- National Human Trafficking Hotline: call 1-888-373-7888 or text 233733. It’s confidential and open 24/7.
- FBI: tips.fbi.gov · 1-800-CALL-FBI.
- HSI tip line: 1-866-347-2423.
Tell your family and friends
Tell them plainly: where you’re going, who invited you, and when you’ll check in. Pick a code word that means “call me now.” If someone tells you to keep a job, a relationship or a payment secret from your family, that’s your sign to tell your family.
Keep your distance without a confrontation
Don’t accuse anyone in the room, and don’t try to investigate on your own. Leave with the people you came with. Don’t take drinks, bags or “favors” from strangers. Keep your own ride, your own ID and your own phone. Screenshot what worries you, then report it to the hotline or the FBI and let trained people handle it. Distance protects you, and a quiet exit is a win.
Know your rights
If you’ve been threatened with arrest, made to carry something, or pushed into anything against your will, talk to a lawyer about your rights before you sign or say anything. The hotline can refer you to legal help, and so can your local bar association’s lawyer referral service.
Sources: Polaris Project; FBI; U.S. Department of Homeland Security Blue Campaign and HSI; FinCEN Advisory FIN-2020-A008 (October 15, 2020); U.S. Department of State, 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report; Lederer & Wetzel, Annals of Health Law 23 (2014); Garot, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (2007). Observations marked as our reporting come from Anthony Perlas’s reporting in Los Angeles nightlife. Header photo: Rlumstead via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Read Part One.
Read Part Three: The Nightlife Report Investigation: Creatures of the Dark and How to Read Them
You might also like
Field ReportsThe Nightlife Report Investigation: Creatures of the Dark and How to Read Them (Part Three)
NewsYeezy Season 01 Comes to Beverly Boulevard. What to Know Before Wednesday’s Show
NightlifeForty Years of Fire: How LA Opera Went From an Olympic Dream to Hercules vs Vampires on Halloween Night
NewsThe Pulse: Fifty Years of Five Boroughs, LA’s Library-Card Costume and Eileen Otte Ford’s Business of Showing Up
ExplainersHow Tables Work in Los Angeles: Bottle Service at Poppy, Delilah and the h.wood Rooms
VideoWhy Thursday Is Jupiter’s Day: Dies Iovis and the Spiritual Forecast
Leave a Reply